Hum… lots of questions.
Wind speed is a part. but also game time is a part. If you speed up game time the wind would move faster as well - yet you don’t want the time passing to turn into a hurricane, so usually the wind is kept constant.
if your clouds are only driven by wind, then they will remain constant as well…
For dynamic weather systems you just deal with the overhead. Usually it’s a main aspect of gameplay, so you bite the bullet and do what you can to maintain a decent amount of memory/fps.
Usually though, the systems are built entirely on one blueprint/actor what have you, so that if you need a tick event to run there’s only one and it controls everything.
generally different functions within it allow you to call it in place from within the level blueprint.
You can take apart the skysphere as an example. It is essentially a small dynamic system that works through function calls and by looking at other items that are specified as variables (the light source).
There are a multitude of reasons to make your own unwrapped sphere instead of using the engine’s default.
for one, a custom made sphere will allow proper UV mapping of textures you want to use.
Secondly, you can add different UV channels and do different things with the materials and custom UVs.
I have done this before for instance, to implement the NASA star map in 8k as the stars.
I have also made the sphere rotate instead of the material so that the revolutions match the day time exactly without any panner nonsense… and it works much better since it’s less math.
In fact, you can actually use custom rotators in blueprint and change the speed at which they spin without too much trouble. (And the on tick event for those is ran by the engine so I’m not sure if you get a benefit or not, but in the end it’s a pretty simple operation).
The wind actor you could pass in into the new blueprint as a variable and just read its values right into the on tick event that runs everything.
So yes. You can make the wind direction and intensity be driven by the wind actor and affect your custom blueprint with a little work.
It is time consuming, but in the end you can use it as a learning excuse to get some blueprint communication basics in your hat…